The Being of Language

 

 

 

Part I

 

Literary Theory and the Concealment of Being

 

 

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the

saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.

For questioning is the piety of thought.

                                                                   - Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology -

 

 

In History, Theory, Text Elizabeth Clark traces the predominantly 20^th century movement of what she refers to as ‘literary theory’.[1]  The subtitle of her work, Historians and the Linguistic Turn, testified to her belief that what she is tracing is a linguistic turn or shift.

 

On November 20^th 2001, Jacques Derrida participated in an English language round-table discussion at Loughborough University, which was dubbed ‘Life After Theory’.  The first comment he made, when given the opportunity to speak, was:  “Now, I never use the word ‘theory’ in the way that you do here; I don’t use the word ‘theory’ after you, after the Americans and the English speakers.  So, I would translate this into French as ‘life after philosophy.’” 

 

Derrida, like Gadamer and Foucault, was a philosopher, not a ‘theorist’, as the English speaking world refers to those philosophers, particularly from the European Continent, who do not fit the Anglo-American category of ‘philosophy’.  Of course, for various reasons, which are often incomprehensible, Clark appears to be unaware of this, and her exposition of the ideas of such thinkers is important in that the scholarly and general community need to be exposed to such subversive, questioning critical ‘theories’ in whatever way possible.  It is a noble act to, as Clark says, “reach across disciplinary fences”(161).  More scholars stand to learn from her openness.  In fact, the roots of what she refers to as ‘the linguistic turn’ are deeply philosophical and, more importantly, highly political in nature, which further contributes to the comfortable forgetting, which has occurred – or perhaps its roots were never really revealed in the English speaking world.  The genealogy of the transmutation of the word philosopher and philosophy into theorist and theory respectively, is a complex one and this is not the place to trace its genealogy.  Suffice it to say, however, that there is a forgetting or concealment that underlies this usage and it is on this concealment that I want to briefly dwell here.

 

The concealment of the naming of the philosopher and philosophy as theory and theorist respectively is the reason underlying Clark’s reading of the ‘turn’ about which she writes as ‘linguistic’.  She believes that it is an issue of language, of texts and contexts.  In a sense, it is, but not in the traditional sense that she takes it, it is about the being of language, the being that underlies language.  When Foucault titled his short, but influential essay, Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur, ‘what is an author’, and set out to destroy any and all residue of the ideological force that such a notion might have still had, one must at least wonder about the word itself.   His choice of the word auteur was a significant one  It derives from the Latin auctor or ‘originator’, which signals the underlying ontology of presence – that being is a substance (substantia) that underlies all things as objective ground – that was and still continues to be the basis for all ideological assumptions or mythologies serving as the foundation of human ‘ideals’.  Foucault is trying to dispel the myth of essentialism and its traditional derivatives such as ‘human nature’, ‘God’, ‘inalienability’, the ‘self’, ‘autonomy’ and so on.  Derrida, Barthes and Gadamer are part of this 20^th century philosophical project.

 

Clark inadvertently allows this concealment to reveal itself twice in chapter 7 of her book, once on page 137 with her use of “phenomenology of presence” and a second time on page 142, when she refers to Derrida’s use of the phrase “metaphysical assumption”.  The ‘turn’ in language and the reading of texts and related matters are a consequence of the metaphysical or, more specifically, ontological ‘turn’ that was first fully concretized in Heidegger’s epochal Being and Time.  Derrida’s philosophy of language is a consequence of this fundamental ontological shift, which he explores in numerous texts.   

 

Derrida and Gadamer are not appropriating “different Heidegger’s”(137), since the notion that there even are two Heidegger, an ‘early’ and a ‘late’, arose mostly as an attempt to explain away the very real complexities of Heidegger’s thought.  As early as Being and Time (1927), Heidegger had argued:

 

The idea of being as constant objective presence not only motivates an

extreme definition of the being of innerworldly (innerweltlich) beings

and their identification with the world as such, it simultaneously blocks

the possibility of bringing to view attitudes of Da-sein in a way which

is ontologically appropriate (Sein und Zeit, 98 [German pagination]).

 

An ontology of presence gives rise to an extreme identification or equation of human beings with their world, their context.  Such an assumption fails to account for the appropriate “attitudes” human beings have, that is, the attitudes they possess and that define their being in the world – Heidegger’s notion of Welt or ‘world’ means far more than the mere physical and social globe.  The scholar can assume that he has access to the ‘inner’ experience or world of another or even of himself, he can assume that he can put on the ‘insider’s lens’ and decipher the meaning, the essence, the intention of a given text.  Heidegger makes this comment early on in Being and Time, before he actually mounts perhaps the most sustained destructive critique of the notion of an ontology of presence, using a method, which he called Destruktion, literally ‘destruction’, which is actually where Derrida derives the fundamentals of ‘deconstrution’.  It is this that underlies the ‘linguistic turn’ that Clark signals.  Before epistemology there is ontology, there must be being before there is knowledge of beings.

 

Heidegger problematized fundamental traditional notions like ‘being’ and ‘truth’ by arguing that they simultaneously reveal and conceal themselves, or, put otherwise, they inhabit a simultaneity of in-sistence and ex-istence, that is, a standing-in and standing-out.  Thus, existence, literally ‘standing-out’ (ex-stare), is itself a being outside itself, a transcendence and hence an objective concealment, a hiding way from sight.  Therefore, the notion of all modes of being as presence, that being is always something there, ready at hand and waiting to be discovered is fundamentally flawed and naïve to say the least.  Such a monumental revolution in the fundamentals of thought, in metaphysics and ontology, has and will continue to have immense consequences for us, not the least of which has already and will continue to be in epistemology, in how we access, view, classify and categorize our knowledge.  It is important to bear this in mind when grasping at such romantic and uncritical notions as ‘objectivity’, the ‘insider’s perspective’ and the like; for the objective is simultaneously the subjective and the insider’s perspective the outsider’s perspective.  When taking a naïve, unquestioning stance in thinking, it is at that very moment that we forget being and ourselves become questionable.   

  

 

 

Part II

 

Rivers Beneath the Horizon

 

 

potamoisi toisi autoisi embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.

 

As they step into the same rivers, different and diverse waters flow upon them.

 

                                                                                    - Heraclitus, fragment 12 - 

 

Text:

 

Textus

 

A singular being-in the community of infinite weavings of multiplicities, never as isolatable singularity.

 

An ever flowing singular river of multiplicity beneath the ever receding horizon: context.

 

Da-sein – being-there, where the da, the ‘there’, is a flowing river reaching into infinite and unquenchable bodies of water, into the infinitude of context.

 

A river flowing in the spatio-temporal simultaneity of inside/outside, always on the margins, between words, between letters and the spaces between the spaces themselves.

 

A singular multiplicity of thought, action, laughter, love and so of the political, the religious, the ethical.

 

 

Context:

 

Cum-textus

 

The community of texts, the togetherness of web formations, the interweaving of multiplicities, which are themselves weavings.

 

The infinite totality of rivers beneath the ever receding horizon.

 

The horizonal sky beneath which is the infinitude of being, within which there is all self and otherness no longer dichotomous.

 

The exception (or ‘taking-out’) of the polarization of inside/outside and the formation of their spatio-temporal nexus.

 

A play, a dance, a poem, an experiment and their infinite totality:  philosophy.

 

 

Author:

 

Auctor

 

The originator: the divine, the alpha and the omega, but as agapē, as charity, as love, never as substance, as objective presence – always beyond being: Dieu sans l’être.

 

Descending and ascending as the horizon, as context, as infinitude.

 

The force of attraction and repulsion in the infinite spaces between texts: the textuality of texts.  Love must repel, it must be repulsive so as to create space for attraction, for an intimate drawing-near.    

 

The charity drawing together and separating the infinite rivers of multiplicity to create their infinite totality, to create context.

 

 

Reader:

 

Rædan

 

An interpreter of enigmatic dreams.

 

The messenger of the gods whom love offers to move through the infinite totality of rivers that constitute the horizon.

 

Sein-können – potential-for-being, potential infinitude, but whose simultaneous actual finitude limits him to finite actualities beneath the infinitude of context, beneath the infinite potentialities.  He thus resists love and infinite charity while simultaneously accepting it, he too is simultaneously repulsive and attractive.

 

A text infused with divine charity and so itself an enigmatic dream – self-interpreter: auto-hermeneutician.

 

The simultaneity of finite knowledge and infinite certainty arising from a lack of perspective available only in the infinitude of context.

 

Finitude in search of infinitude who forgets his search, his being, his infinite task.

 

 

 

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[1] See, however, page 164, where she twice uses the phrase “literary-philosophical theory.”

~ by Babak on October 5, 2008.